Crunch Pak to offer mobile coupon

Crunch Pak plans to offer a $1 coupon for its sliced apples through a text-based promotion on an electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square.

The back-to-school promotion is scheduled to start Aug. 18, when the billboard will ask passersby to text the word APPLES to 65047, sending them a link to the coupon, good for any size package.

Crunch Pak plans to give the digital coupon a number to track the redemption rate and measure billboard views and responses.

“It’s a lot to communicate in 15 seconds,” Tony Freytag, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Cashmere, Wash.-based Crunch Pak, said in a news release. “We are excited to see the response and we’re fairly certain no other produce company will have this type of back-to-school promotion.”

Crunch Pak began a yearlong marketing campaign on the billboard at 1541 Broadway in May with an ad slated to appear more than 17,000 times.

On Aug. 22, the company plans to offer product samples under the 10-by-90 foot billboard for five hours.